I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.

Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley.

Most death now happens in hospitals. It's been medicalized. It happens away from where we deal with it directly. And that's a huge change. At the beginning of the 20th century most people died at home. Death was much more common.

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.